eScholar Launches Student Goal Planning Application
- By Dian Schaffhauser
- 01/20/12
A company that specializes in data management products for K-12 and higher education environments has come out with an application for managing student goals. eScholar, which produces Complete Data Warehouse, launched eScholar myTrack to enable teams of people--administrators, teachers, staff, and the student and his or her parents--to monitor and participate in the development of a student's progress in class and across grades.
myTrack pulls data about the individual student from the longitudinal data warehouse to give a better understanding, based on the data, about a student's unique needs, deficiencies, and possible areas of improvement.
Available now, the software will be expanded in multiple phases, the company said. The formal program areas currently addressed by the release include:
- Response to intervention;
- Personalized education planning;
- Differentiated education planning; and
- Positive behavior intervention and support.
Future versions of myTrack will address these areas:
- Giving students access to their own educational goals, created with input from teachers and staff;
- Providing mechanisms to enable students and staff to track progress and be directed to specific strategies and interventions;
- Identifying at-risk students early and targeting interventions linked to state standards and objectives, and then following progress;
- Letting administrators identify and monitor interventions and strategies that have the optimal effect; and
- Getting students involved in goal setting throughout their school years and into their initial career years.
One early customer of myTrack is North Carolina's Cumberland County Schools, a current customer of eScholar. The vendor said Cumberland played a major role in the design and development of myTrack and was the first district to pilot the new application.
The program, said Ruben Reyes, executive director of exceptional children's services at Cumberland, "is allowing us to use the data typically focused on reporting and tracking results at the administrator level, to create personalized education plans at the student level... By using data as a part of a systemic process, we can better identify strategies that work."
About the Author
Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.